[Problems] of interpretation abound [in the four novels of The Sea of Fertility: Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel]…. [The] prevalence of Mishima's hybrid personal symbolism leaves the reader uncertain of the correct context in interpreting Mishima's fictional—and philosophical—approach to Reincarnation. Like the characters in Mishima's play Dōjōji, we are faced with sounds simultaneously identified as Nō chant and "a noisy factory." We only know that we are participating in Mishima's "beautiful, sweaty, intricate choreography of death." (p. 289)

[In] view of the care with which Mishima completed his manuscript [for The Sea of Fertility] hours before the action of his seppuku, we are surely justified in seeking clues to his death by sword in these four novels. At the same time, the tetralogy reexamines Mishima's earlier literary preoccupations, ideas beautifully and ironically resolved in that area of the moon from which the novels take their name, the arid Sea of Fertility.

In these four novels, familiar Mishima settings, recurrent characters, and obsessive themes, symbols, and images all make their final appearance. The recurrent image of sweating flesh is even elevated to a metaphysical sign foreshadowing decay—just as these four novels foreshadowed Mishima's own death. (pp. 290-91)

At the simple narrative level, The Sea of Fertility presents a four-part chronicle of the reincarnation of a beautiful boy, Kiyoaki…. (p. 291)

[But it] is impossible to read these novels in the simplistic terms of plot: ultimately, the reader must face the metaphysical implications. At the same time, the novels of the tetralogy are linked—by character, symbol, and incident—to earlier fictions, essays, drama, even musical comedy lyrics. Mishima did indeed include everything of his life and thought in The Sea of Fertility.

Even the nagging voice of the pedagogue-author occasionally seems to be that issuing from behind the masks of earlier characters. Once more, Mishima's characters are not permitted well-developed individualized voices; the reader may well grow tired of the excess of aphoristic commentary. To replace such earlier (and unlikely) mouthpieces as a thirteen-year-old boy discoursing on "the chaos of existence" in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Mishima produces extraordinarily varied figures in his final work, however.

Mishima's earlier tetralogy, Kyōko no Ie (Kyōko's House …), had failed largely on account of its excess of philosophy over (literary) art…. And the reader not inclined to philosophical speculation finds much of The Sea of Fertility as arid as its namesake on the moon.

In The Sea of Fertility, the reader is offered a four-part education not only in reincarnation but also in the meaning of Free Will; in Hindu belief …; in esoteric elements of Buddhist belief …; in the Sutra of the Peacock Wisdom King; in a world survey of theories of transmigration…. (pp. 295-96)

Whatever the meaning of The Sea of Fertility as a whole, it is appropriate that the most insistent of the recurrent themes is seppuku, the action with which Mishima achieved his bumbu ryōdō [unity of spirit and action]. Seppuku—"beautiful" death by the sword—is muted in the first volume, where Kiyoaki specifically reacts against "militarism." In the second volume, sword and seppuku and the ideals of past warriors provide a gloss on all of Mishima's work. There are links not only with the treatment of seppuku … in his films, dramas, and fictions, but also with his discussion of the samurai code in Hagakure Nyūmon, the voices of spirits of the war dead in Eirei no Koe, and other untranslated discussions of the Japanese Spirit…. (pp. 289-99)

As the catalogue of seppuku and other deaths by sword continues …, the reader hears echoes of Mishima's voice in a hundred other settings. Isao declares: "Once the flame of loyalty blazed up within one, it was necessary to die"—the words sound like a preliminary script for Mishima's own death-scene Geki (Appeal). References to disemboweling and a dagger in the throat described as "graceful" or "brave" further suggest the language of "Patriotism." And when even the rather phlegmatic Honda dreams of "the supreme bliss of the moment of suicide," we hear once again the voice not of created character but of creator-author.

A substantial portion of Runaway Horses is a treatise on "lost" Japanese values as well as on the sword and noble death—again reminiscent of Mishima's aesthetic and his repeated references to the role of the sword in exalting the Japanese spirit. (p. 299)

In The Temple of Dawn, however, death by sword takes its metaphysical aspect from the ritual slaughter of goats, sacrifices to the Hindu Durga (Kali). And images of beautiful death by sword cannot convey the theme of decay in the final volume. In the account of The Decay of the Angel, with its metaphysics of sweating flesh, the noble image of suicide is flawed…. [For example], Tōru believes he will find true perspective "on the far side of death"; he thinks of the sexual fullness of love-suicide and foresees death in terms of pain. Mishima's words, perhaps—but ambiguous, especially when we consider Tōru's signs of decay.

The theme of beautiful death is also carried in imagery of swords—whether in a "sharp" blade of grass or the "stabs" of a cold shower. (p. 300)

Throughout The Sea of Fertility … images of beauty and beautiful death are linked to the ideally beautiful male figure that moves through all of Mishima's fictions. In Spring Snow, Kiyoaki is described in terms that show he is exceptionally beautiful, a doomed figure with "smooth" back, "grace," and "firm masculinity."… Once again, we meet a man "afflicted" by true beauty, with a predilection for suffering and an incapacity for friendship…. (p. 302)

Images of beautiful death are oddly resolved in the final volume with the Beauty—and Decay—of Tōru, another of Mishima's many sea-linked hero-gods. Tōru is linked with the sea at the most literal level…. It is fitting that this sea god should be discovered by Honda: Honda is the unifying figure who moves through each narrative to simultaneously identify the lovely Kiyoaki and speak the words of Mishima's philosophy. (p. 304)

Honda's thoughts on suicide … may hint of a deeper symbolism in Mishima's many deaths by water…. Through Honda, Mishima suggests that Time should be cut short just before the waterfall's plunge—at the pinnacle of physical beauty. (p. 306)

The dominant colors of blood, sun, and fire had been muted in Spring Snow—as in the golden sheen and scarlet reflections of the mother's fan. Garden settings in that novel provided a traditional (red) flower-in-the-mirror or moon-in-the-water image, too: the reflection of red maple leaves in the pond (although, as so often in Mishima's fictions, that image set up ripples of disquiet). In Runaway Horses, the blood red of heroic death is linked with the vermilion and gold of the symbolic sun, the "true image of His Sacred Majesty." (p. 308)

In The Decay of the Angel, Mishima uses the same palette…. The Robe of Feathers myth blazes with golden fire imagery, as Honda meditates on the tennin and the Five Signs of Decay. And the fire—like the sea—merges with images of cruelty and with sexual associations even while it hints of metaphysical meaning.

Fire, blood, and sea are simultaneously setting and symbol. So too the metaphysical sweat that marks the decay of the heavenly being is accompanied by real sweat throughout the entire tetralogy. (pp. 308-09)

[The] hints of sweating bodies move from erotic to metaphysical meaning…. In The Decay of the Angel, the sign begins as "cold sweats," with a glimpse of Tōru continually washing his armpits. Later, Honda sweats profusely as he puffs uphill to the mystic, sunlit garden. But by then the scene of Tōru's decay—the five signs now shown in his soiled, smelly appearance and flower-decked hair—has already signaled the passage into Nothingness.

Thus The Sea of Fertility seems to end. Yet its timing does not quite coincide with the dramatic ending of Mishima's own life, in spite of his assertion he would realize his bumbu ryōdō in this dual performance. For although the fourth novel opens in the year of Mishima's death, its narrative carries us into the future, four years hence. We are thus reminded of Mishima's comments on his inability to imagine a world continuing beyond the world of his novel. There is also a profound paradox: a tetralogy taking reincarnation for action, theme, characters, and imagery simultaneously presents "words" (spoken by a woman, though!) to suggest that perhaps the beautiful Kiyoaki had never "existed."

Paradoxes, however, are characteristic of all Mishima's work—including the odd "Greek" way that he identified with noble samurai ideals of his own nation's past and his search for a renewal of Japanese "spirit" by means of such foreign devices as body-building and weight-lifting. Moreover, the values that Mishima so often said that he wished to "restore" are values that receive scant support in his imagined universe.

In all his work, there are problems of setting. Even when his characters are not moving in an exotic world of Brazilian coffee plantation, ancient Leper King court, or modern political arena, they seem to be blind to the Japanese aesthetic. In Mishima's theory of fiction, dramatic necessity does not justify a character's ignorance (even of so small a matter as the correct name for traditional furnishings). Why then, is so much of his fictional world profoundly foreign? Why are his characters so consistently blind to every imaginable Japanese value?

Mishima himself attempted to revive the spirit of Young Samurai while living in a Western-style Tokyo house filled with Greek statuary, European furniture, and the works of foreign authors. The characters in his fictions sleep not under soft Japanese quilts (futon) on the tatami but in Western twin beds, in brass beds imported from New Orleans, or in double beds whose squeaking springs are lovingly detailed. Underfoot there is parquet flooring or Persian carpeting, while crystal chandeliers dangle from the ceiling. When lovers write, they do not inscribe poems on fans or use a brush and delicate Japanese paper: they use a ballpoint pen on stationery embossed with a design from Walt Disney. (pp. 309-10)

As these characters smoke their brand-named American cigarettes or drive their (branded) American cars, they do indeed suffer those "symptoms of the disease of modernity" mentioned in Forbidden Colors. Like the boy in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, they appear to break "the endless chain of society's taboos." They reject the Japanese sense of aware and share with Shunsuke the experience of "Ionian melancholy."

This world seems entirely divorced from the lyrical Japanese feeling of Kawabata's. (p. 311)

The reader who responds to Kawabata's delicate brush strokes while being repulsed by the harsh lines of Mishima's world might at this point recall some aspects of Japanese history. For instance, readers disturbed over Mishima's enthusiasm for Western body-building techniques as a first step on the route to Japanese spiritual regeneration might well recall that Japan's traditional arts were for some years proscribed by the Mac-Arthur regime. Along with that temporary loss of the spiritual elements of their martial arts, the Japanese also suffered a separation from Shintō (blamed for "nationalistic" fervor, although it is an inseparable element also of modern attitudes toward sex). They suffered an even more terrifying loss when their Emperor—a figure whose Divine Majesty is in direct descent from the (Shintō) Sun Goddess Amaterasu—was suddenly presented to them as a man who appeared in department stores, carrying his soft-crowned hat.

This is the lost postwar world appearing in so many of Mishima's fictions. It is a world we must understand in Japanese terms if we wish to know how men as apparently unlike as Kawabata and Mishima can describe their work in terms of postwar nihilism. This is the world whose inhabitants live in the "spiritual vacuum" to which Mishima so often referred in his last years—the world he described in Taidō as one where, thoughtless, "we are rushing headlong toward fragmentation, functionalization, and specialization … toward the dehumanizing of the human being."

These are the dehumanizing crannies that Mishima explores with such obsessive vigor—unmasking all the inhabitants…. He drags them out of the soft light of a moon-viewing party into the glare of neon and the brilliance of crystal chandeliers. He shows them viewing cherry blossoms that resemble "undertaker's cosmetics" or that are only discarded paper decorations…. (pp. 311-13)

Mishima and his characters alike seem to deny many aspects of their past, but they cannot escape its meaning. (p. 313)

Thus Mishima prepared for his final union of spirit and action through the writing of four novels reexamining events and meanings of Japanese history…. If the conventional Japanese symbols appear but rarely in his pages, and seem to deny this past, we should recall the seemingly flawed maple-viewing incident at the opening of Spring Snow. Discovering a dead dog in the waterfall would seem to be a disastrously "wrong" version of autumn's traditional maple-leaf viewing. Yet it is worth noting that for the abbess of Gesshūji this does not spoil the occasion. On the contrary, it stimulates thoughts of yuishiki—of awareness or consciousness—the thread of meaning that runs through the bewildering reincarnations and transformations of Mishima's beautiful boy(s).

However barren The Sea of Fertility may seem to be, in Mishima's version it is fed by the purifying waterfall, moves with the passions of his sea imagery, is illuminated by the colors of sun and fire, and is part of the mythic memory of the life-giving (Hindu) Sea of Milk. However ugly the businessmen, the politicians, the housewives, the lovers, the priests, and however decayed the bodies of young sea gods, there is Beauty—to be glimpsed but never grasped. It is to be found in the Golden Pavilion of the imagination: not in the peeling paint of a neglected and flawed building. Thus it is fitting that Mishima's own death was a return to the past, as he performed the act of seppuku, the warrior's ultimate gesture.

That bloody, beautiful ritual death, however, can be understood only if it is recognized as a gesture linked with Mishima's view of the "heroic" and "beautiful" death in Sun and Steel, with his belief that the most profound depth of the imagination lay in death. And of course the gesture takes on added significance when it is seen as Mishima's own way of finding that "endless beauty"—cutting time short in that instant of the "radiant pinnacle"—described in the waterfall and flowing streams, the images of The Sea of Fertility. (pp. 313-14)

Gwenn Boardman Petersen, "Mishima Yukio," in her The Moon in the Water. Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima (copyright © 1979 by The University Press of Hawaii), University Press of Hawaii, 1979, pp. 201-319.